Distant Gateway
by KrisEleven
Summary: Written for the September challenge on the TPE: Writing Challenges forum. Eleni Cooper has an unbidden guest in her room as she packs to leave the Temple of the Mother in disgrace. She doesn't expect to get very sound advice from him - he's surely never shown much sense before - but Kyprioth, the God of Tricksters, proves he can surprise her.


A/N This was written for a September challenge on Tamora Pierce Experiment: Writing Challenges forum, which provided a list of 'must-haves' for the fic, including a frog, a kiss and a concession, in this case. This takes place while Eleni is pregnant with George, prior to the Song of the Lioness quartet. Eleni's story is canon, but the link to the Trickster (from the DotL series) is not. Enjoy!

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Eleni walked back to her room with her eyes to the ground, whispers following behind her. She felt her cheeks flame red and tried her hardest to hide the tear-tracks that her meeting with the Temple Superiors had brought to them. She passed the other priestesses of the Temple of the Mother and they stared and spoke behind their hands; they had all heard of her disgrace. Finally, she managed to make it into her room, the rest of the world on the other side of the solid door shut behind her and outside the small window overlooking a courtyard. Her herbs blew gently in the breeze her entrance had drawn in through the open panes and as she leaned back against the door, she wondered how everything had managed to fall so utterly and completely out of her control.

She realised she was rubbing the swell of her stomach and stopped, placing her fists against the door behind her and lowering her head. _Not the baby's fault_, she thought, _mine and his, and mine most of all. I should have known better. I should have embraced the routine rather than rebel against it. I should have known that a dalliance was wrong. I should have never allowed it to happen without a pregnancy charm, if I was to allow it to happen _at all_. Nevermind that no harm was done and the Mother surely couldn't look too harshly at me, if it is her will when babies are conceived at all... But I didn't realise I wanted to keep him._

She looked up, her hand drifting to her stomach again. She had meant, walking into her meeting with the Temple Superiors, to own up to her mistake, accept the consequences and the punishments and the shame, take her exile to a farm outside Corus and give the babe up once he was born, as was the way of these things. They had begun making plans for her as if she wasn't sitting in the room with them and she had heard herself speaking before she even realised she had changed her mind.

"_I'm not staying with the Temple if it means giving up my child."_

And that was that. Once it was out of her mouth, it could not be taken back and, suddenly, she had found she didn't mean to. There was nothing that could change her mind, and she was dismissed to pack and return to her parents, no longer a priestess of the Mother. No longer anything.

Movement outside her second-story window caught her eye. He wasn't one for quiet entrances. In all the time Eleni Cooper had been acquainted with The Trickster, she had never known him, the master of the subtle arts of slight-of-hand and illusions of the mind, to appear to her in anything less than dramatic style. It was as much his way as any, she supposed, watching the purple frog sneak from pot to pot and through her open window, but she wondered if it wasn't beneath a god's dignity to behave such.

"And if I catch you in a jar," she asked him, watching him freeze as he was noticed, "will you have to grant me wishes to be released?"

In the moment it took her to blink, the frog was gone and a man of indeterminate age and impeccable, rich dress stood before her.

"You would risk the wrath of the gods?" he asked, laughing. The choice of words – so close to those spoken to her by the Superiors earlier that afternoon – hit her hard and she blinked at him. The seriousness of her expression tempered his amusement. He looked at her and nodded, knowingly. "Ah," he said.

"You knew?" she asked, the simplicity of his acknowledgment inciting the anger she had been hiding for nearly a month. Two people were involved in her great crime, and she knew the consequences wouldn't touch the young man she had dallied with a jot. The unfairness of it all still took her breath away.

"It was one of your futures. Of course I did not know for sure – you know we cannot see the future, only possibilities of it – but I did suspect it would turn out this way."

"Is that why you've chosen to hound me these past few years?" she snapped, throwing clothes into a bag. "Because you wanted to see one of your sister's guardians struck low? Was she really such competition for my attention? Well, congratulations, _Mister Trickster_, you have your wish. I am to be sent to my family in disgrace, to beg for them to forgive me my _one_ mistake and allow them to hold it over me for the rest of my life while I walk with my eyes to the ground, cowed and guilt-stricken. _Any_ chance I have for my own life is gone, but as long as you have managed to strike one against your si–"

"Stop speaking, Eleni Cooper," Kyprioth said, and she stopped in the middle of her word, reminded forcefully that she was speaking to a god. Her gaze was glued to the bag sitting on her cot, half-packed, she was so afraid of looking up and meeting the gaze of the god she had displeased with harsh words. "I have had no hand in this." His tone softened. "And I take no pleasure from it, either, though it is an ironic turn, that you would leave my sister's service for something she so values."

Eleni caught her breath slowly, as he became less god-like and poked around her things, moving trinkets and clothes from a table and sitting himself on it. "What do you plan to do with the child, then?"

Eleni laughed humourlessly. "I won't give him up."

Kyprioth looked up, amused again. "How did you know it would be a boy?"

"He is?" she asked, rubbing her stomach again. "I didn't... He and I have been keeping a secret together for a month; it didn't feel right to refer to him as 'it', or not at all."

"He has every chance to be a strong-willed child, a talented youth, and a man you will be proud of," Kyprioth said, moving around the room again. Eleni watched him carefully; often – not always, nothing was _always_ with gods or tricksters, and he was both – when he was at his most unconcerned he was either hiding something or talking about something important... or both. "He may be a follower of mine, one day."

"_That_ is why you have been paying your attentions to _me_," she said. "I belong to the Goddess, and I always have, but you knew that you would have a follower in my _child_."

"Nothing is certain, not even with gods, when it comes to the future, but every once in a while there are certain circumstances that come together to bring about something interesting. I have never been a competitor for your attentions, dear Eleni, though it wasn't for lack of trying." She shook her head. She had never noticed him trying to do anything but try her nerves. He grinned at her, guessing what she was thinking and finding amusement in it as he continued talking. "My followers are mostly delegated to a small portion of the world, now, thanks to your patron and my brother's attentions." Something darkened his eyes for a moment, and then was gone as he flipped a broach into the air and caught it again. "Your son could be unextraordinary. He could go through life apprenticed to your cousin. Or possibly working on docks in Port Caynn. He could allow his life to come to nothing, or worse than nothing. His could be one of a million unexceptional fates. That is the right and privilege of all men.

"But... there is a chance, no matter how slim, that he may become more than you can foresee, even with a mother's vision. And that, Eleni Cooper, is why I am interested."

"An unextraordinary life may be better than other choices," she said bitterly. "If I had followed along, kept my head down, been just like everyone else, I would have saved myself an awful lot of heartache."

"Look to me," Kyprioth said, and she did, unable to look away from his gaze once she met it. "You think that a change in your life is the end of it, but that is not true. You do not have to be cowed into submission; indeed, it will kill your fire and your soul to try. Do not drop your gaze. Do not give up your life without a fight. You have talents and strength that you have not thought of yet, and you will make it through this without giving up your freedom for it." He made a face, looking out the window and breaking the spell between them. "Believe me on this; freedom is to be cherished, and fought for... at all costs. Take it from one who has lost it to know," he said quietly. He looked back and smiled the careless, unbounded grin that belonged only to a god of tricksters. "There will be hard times between then and now, but one day you will pass through a gateway on the other side of the turmoil that stands between here and there. If you give in and lose yourself, that distant gateway to happiness will be lost to you forever; you cannot pass through that which another person holds in their grasp.

"And I must go," he said, looking around. "Spending too much time in my sister's house is not a good idea."

Eleni held up a hand. "If he is one day to become a follower of yours, Trickster, it will be his choice and his alone. Promise me you will not affect his life. Promise me to only go to him if he chooses you."

Kyprioth stared at her for a long moment and she met his gaze squarely, refusing to back down. He smiled. "There is your spirit back, Eleni. It really is too bad my sister won your heart; I would not have said no to a worshipper like you." Reaching out and taking her hand, he kissed its back and was gone.

"Trickster!" she said, exasperated.

His voice trailed through the empty room. "I will leave your son to his own choices until he prays to me, in the midst of a great trick. And then – and only then, once his choice is made – will I affect his life in the slightest. Until then, Mother Cooper."

Eleni closed her eyes for only a moment, and then finished packing her bags. Walking back down the hallway and towards the door to the street, she met the stares straight-on and ignored the whispers, her head held high.

She would face her family and choose which life she and her child were to lead. It may be a long way until she was through to happiness and security, and she didn't know what kind of road lay between walking through the Temple doors and that time... but it would be _her _road.

She was fairly sure she heard Kyprioth laugh, approvingly, as she walked into the sun and out onto a Corus street.


End file.
